Microsoft

Microsoft has more than 2 million certified individuals across its many programs. The company's array of certifications prove an IT professional's fluency as an Administrator, Systems Engineer, Support Technician, and Application Developer. Pearson IT Certification has a variety of products to help you prepare for these exams and to ensure testing success.

Blogs

Interesting item showed up on the Born to Learn blog from Larry Kaye at Microsoft Learning on February 16, 2016, to inform readers that most of the SQL Sever exams will now cover content from both SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014. This should extend the lifetime of current SQL Server certs for a while, as new version is expected to follow in the wake of Windows Server 2016, scheduled for public release sometime in the second half of 2016.

Ace psychometrician and MS Learning guru Liberty Munson helps certification minded IT professionals strike gold once again in a recent blog post for Born to Learn. In that post, she not only asserts that numerous Microsoft certification exams can provide college credit at a large number of institutions at the rate of 2-3 credit hours a pop, she also provides a list of the exam that potentially qualify for this bonanza.

In trying to understand the value proposition for IT certification, employers and IT pros alike are always interested in finding good answers to the question posed in this blog post's title: "Why hire certified IT pros?" Cert sponsors, always seeking to sell more cert exams and expand their certified populations, are no less interested in providing such answers. A recent study from IDC (October 2015) entitled "The Business Value of IT Certification" provides some interesting and useful answers of interest to all parties.

When LinkedIn bought online training company Lynda.com in April 2015, a lot of people wondered what was really going on behind the scenes. A recent post from Steve Weiss, Content Manager for Business and Data Science at Linked (formerly at Lynda.com), helps put such speculation to rest: in a self-referential bow toward data mining/Big Data/Data Science, LinkedIn has been mining the heck out of its 400-million-plus user base and watching hiring decisions made under its purview to help the company target hot education topics. What's at the top of the list for 2016?